On the box

TV review

BURN UP

BBC2 Wednesday and Friday, 9pm

HARLEY STREET

STV Thursday, 9pm

THE WIRE

FX Monday, 10pm

THE riveting petrochemical conspiracy thriller, Burn Up, began with a moment of exquisite irony. Our hero, a charismatic oil executive played by Spooks refugee Rupert Penry-Jones, stared down a boardroom full of company men and asked if they knew what a barrel of crude was currently trading for.

Worryingly, none responded, suggesting that fictional energy conglomerate Arrow Oil had inherited some of Enron's dimmer fluorescent bulbs. Even more alarming, however, was the answer Penry-Jones provided: $98. And so, what was surely intended as a dystopian prediction when the scene was shot, today prompts reveries of the halcyon days when a barrel could still be had for double digits and motorists could refuel without having to sell their corneas.

As I write, black gold goes for an apocalyptic $128 a barrel, but by the time this sees print we might already be battling Mohawked berserkers down at the forecourt for the last remaining drops of unleaded.

Although screenwriter Simon Beaufoy's financial projections may have been overly rosy, every other aspect of this thriller was painfully pertinent. Gnawing away at the remnants of his conscience, eco-minded co-worker Neve Campbell soon had Penry-Jones ensconced in a topical conspiracy involving peak oil, climate change and sinister industry efforts to torpedo a successor to Kyoto. And though our heroes occasionally seemed a smidgen too self-righteous, West Wing star Bradley Whitford provided a splendidly amoral industry fixer.

The only false note in Burn Up was a scene in which a protesting Inuit activist doused herself with hydrocarbons and applied an open flame. It was a powerfully visceral moment but it had the unfortunate effect of turning an intriguing minor character into sacrificial fuel for Penry-Jones's redemption. I'd probably have forgiven this if she'd torched herself in a manner more consistent with her anti-petroleum stance. But then self-immolation by seal blubber is probably trickier than it sounds.

Quite what realm STV's new stetho-soap Harley Street is supposed to be set in remains unclear, but it's certainly not the universe we inhabit. Still tangled in some of last week's plot threads, our hero, Paul Nicholls' dashing Dr Fielding, began this instalment in the clutches of Miranda Cost, a gorgeous but predatory Sloane. Dangling the offer of her father's much-coveted patient list in front of our hero's piercing eyes, she'd coerced him into her boudoir. Not that he needed much coercing, you understand. In fact, given his tendency to bed any woman who wanders into his field of vision and Miranda's not inconsiderable charms, it was a plot-line so mind-throttlingly illogical it could have given Mr Spock an embolism.

But then a similar sense of nuts-a-cuckoo confusion seems to permeate the whole venture. Take Nicholls' co-star Suranne Jones, dementedly miscast as the partner in his private medical practice. On paper, her character is supposed to be a second-generation Harley Street consultant, with a 14-year-old daughter and years of on-the-job experience. Alas, evidently scared of casting an actress of appropriate vintage, the producers have left us wondering when exactly the twenty-something Jones managed to squeeze in medical school and motherhood.

And, try as she might, Jones simply can't manage the patrician vowel sounds demanded of her. Cursed with a wobbly accent which seems to straddle all of England simultaneously, she sounds like an all-you-can-eat buffet of regional cants. It's a painful inconsistency made all the more noticeable by the presence of so many genuine toffs. Still, given that the script asks her to deliver clangers like "There's nothing we can do unless you've found a cure for chronic lymphatic leukaemia!", she surely deserves sympathy rather than scorn.

Verisimilitude was far more evident in The Wire, returning to our screens for a fifth and, alas, final season. Revered by critics but largely ignored by audiences, this Yankee import's reputation as a depressing and densely layered masterpiece is, by this stage, probably repelling would-be viewers. A shame indeed, for though its subject matter is undeniably downbeat, this is, in a strangely mordant fashion, one of the funniest shows on the air.

Last week, in a typically droll pre-credits scene, Detective 'Bunk' Moreland, a Baltimore Homicide cop of incomparable world-weariness, deployed a tried-and-tested routine to turn two teenage murder suspects against each other. Dividing the pair by offering just one of them a Big Mac and fries, he set about dismantling their bond. While they initially rebuffed questions about the blood on their hands, the minor privilege of junk food proved sufficient to shatter their hitherto unshakeable solidarity.

Then, with the felons suffering from the confusing sting of perceived betrayal, he snagged a confession by passing a photocopier off as a polygraph machine. It was an uproarious comic set-piece with a serious subtext. In the relentlessly unglamorous world of The Wire, while every man has his price, the more unwary recidivist can usually be had for the cost of a Happy Meal.

In Channel 4's noble adult literacy venture Can't Read, Can't Write (Channel 4, Monday, 9pm), Phil Beadle, purportedly "Britain's best-known teacher", was grappling with the scale of his new mission. Given just six months to teach nine adults how to read and write, he began by asking his students to explain the extent of their illiteracy. Theresa, a doting grandmother who had somehow managed to hide her illiteracy from most of her family, offered the most unsettling description, likening her fear of written language to that of a "big spider on the wall".

A more unusual case was 46-year-old Linda. She was a functionally illiterate bibliophile who has been stockpiling books in preparation for her future education, and her yearning to connect with the written word had the poignancy of unrequited love. And though she'd made some strides by the end of this episode, it seemed cruel to chain this willing student and her supremely gifted teacher to the show's arbitrary six-month time limit.